Aquarium not bubble

You are in an aquarium, not a bubble.

Government officials who’ve been busy explaining and justifying their “NCR Plus” strategy have referred to the 2-week lock-in as a “travel bubble” where authorized residents of Metro Manila, Bulacan, Cavite, Rizal and Laguna are allowed to move within the bubble to go to work or to undertake essential travel and activity. They are clearly trying to use catchy phrases while misusing the same. You can give a pig all sorts of nicknames but it does not change the fact that it is a pig.

The same goes with the NCR Plus strategy. Government officials are practically lying between their teeth or simply believe that people living inside Metro Manila and the four aforementioned provinces are simply stupid enough to believe or agree that they have not been locked down. I guess it’s a matter of semantics or level of gullibility. Yes, you can travel inside this so-called travel bubble but you must be an Authorized Person Outside Residence or APOR, if not then you can’t, so what changed? LGUs are now requiring IDs, listing designated representative or buyer of essential goods and we are back with the curfews. If you don’t want to call it lockdown then we can call it lock-in, just like our contracts with telcos and cable TV companies where we have to stay with them until the term or contract expires.

Another serious error I see in the NCR Plus strategy is applying the term and concept of “bubble.” Whether you use it for medical or athletic purposes such as basketball, a bubble requires that the entire venue, space, place or facility be sanitized from floor to ceiling. It requires that each and every piece of equipment be sanitized and, most importantly, it requires that each and every person entering the bubble has been screened, tested, quarantined and cleared before entering “The Bubble.” So from a purely technical point of view, the government’s use of the term “Travel Bubble” is completely wrong.

The better term to describe what the government has created is an Aquarium! Most Filipinos at one point of their lives have tried their hands at taking care of fish, have owned or took care of an aquarium at home or perhaps at school. More often than not we bought our fish and supplies from a small pet shop or fish store. One of the first lessons that experts and hobbyists tell beginners is to make sure you quarantine any new fish you bring into the tank to avoid infecting the rest of the population. This is a very important lesson because many pet shops use a centralized water filtration and plumbing system in order to save on electricity and reduce the amount of work cleaning multiple filters.

In the NCR Plus strategy, what the government is doing but not saying is containing the spread of COVID-19 before it jumps to other regions while trying to slow down and reduce the alarming number of cases. By applying the NCR Plus bubble, the government gets to have its cake and eat it too because they have a lock-in that will reduce movement and community transmission while allowing workers to continue working, which frees the government from having to give dole outs or cash in a lock-down.

The only hole in the doughnut is the fact that without vaccines and no known cure for COVID-19 plus the speed of transmission for the UK and SA variants, people within the travel bubble will simply be like fish swimming in a polluted pond. While we quarantine and treat one group of patients, another batch will be getting infected at work, on the bus or at home.

Sadly, the only solution that government had come up with is the NCR Plus or recycled and revised Lock Down from 2020. We have not heard anything about how the DOH or Malacañang plans to cut the chain of infections from work place to household, which has been pointed out by several mayors as the primary source or areas of infections. Unless the government is able to come up with a “COVID Clearing Campaign” where COVID-free zones will be secured one block, one barangay or one city at a time, we will simply have to be content with the lowly aspiration of government to bring COVID-19 infections down from 8,000 to 6,000 by April 4 or 25 percent, as stated by the talking head in Malacañang. The doctors we’ve interviewed on Agenda or spoken with privately have once again repeated the recommendation that only a serious 14-day total lockdown will be effective against COVID-19.

This, however, is a very hard pill for government to dispense since they already squandered that solution back in 2020. We have all been told that the best and simplest way to bring down COVID and practically eradicate it would be to declare a total lockdown and quarantine for 14 days more or less. No leaving homes, no online shopping deliveries, no movement, Nada! But instead of just doing it, the government came up with all sorts of quarantine measures, allowing commercial movement, and generally operating on the basis of “observation and adjustment.”

That is what caused our most recent disaster: people experimenting with reopening the economy without the proper studies, logistics and preparation. They simply opened the gates and let the workers out. Then they relaxed the GCQ implementation, hoping to push towards the more relaxed MGCQ. As we now know and are being punished for, that experiment was a disastrous and fatal mistake.

I am reminded of scenes around Wuhan during the first outbreak there, where residents started putting up barricades, guards or sentries to check on people going in and out of their specific communities. If NCR Plus fails, we may have to resort to KKB – “Kanya Kanyang Bantayan.”

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